Weed and kids are a risky mix — but ‘Garden Moms’ are toking up

The "garden mom" trend combines two of the worst cultural ideas of the past few decades: That modern motherhood is awful, and that drug use is a harmless individual choice. The Adaptive - stock.adobe.com

Motherhood is hard; weed helps: That’s the toxic message from a new group of online influencers — “gardeners,” they like to call themselves — who advocate using cannabis to deal with the stress of parenting small children.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Sarah Levy tallied 76,000 videos on TikTok with the “#gardenmom” label.

There’s Taylor Mitchem (with 120,000 followers), who had a baby in 2020 and felt responsible for most of the child care because her husband was too nervous to help much.

She was a regular weed user before her baby was born to help with her anxiety and ADHD.

So she decided to resume her habit, and began smoking again daily when her kid was 2 ½.

“Life is hard,” she told Levy. “If you have something that takes the edge off a little bit, why not?”

Why not? Because parenting small children while high on drugs is a recipe for disaster.

Using marijuana during pregnancy has been linked to low birth weights and pre-term birth, as well as to abnormal neurological development and a higher likelihood that the child will develop ADHD.

After a baby is born, the risks of weed use only multiply.

First, as anyone who’s ever cared for an infant knows, they need a lot of attention.

It’s not just the feeding and burping and changing; it’s also being attuned to small changes — if they spike a fever, for instance — that can require immediate medical attention.

Then there are the unsafe sleep habits: Of the more than 5,000 child-maltreatment fatality cases my colleagues and I have collected in our database at Lives Cut Short, more than 700 involved unsafe sleep conditions and more than two-thirds involved parental substance use.

Most parents can safely co-sleep with their children, because they will naturally wake up when a child is in distress.

If impaired by drugs or alcohol, though, that awareness may not kick in.

Many of the “garden moms” decide to smoke pot first thing in the morning, though: “Coffee and coughy,” they like to call it.

For those who compare cannabis to alcohol — noting that the latter is legal and probably worse for your health — can you imagine the backlash against mothers doing shots of vodka every morning while their kid is eating Cheerios?

The mothers Levy talked to told her that they “were not putting weed first.”

Rather, they blamed a lack of “meaningful parenting help from other adults” for their stress — and claimed to be “prioritizing their family by using cannabis as a tool: to help them stay patient, to respond neutrally to their children, to be present without becoming overwhelmed—essentially, to be better moms.”

Despite a complete lack of medical evidence that marijuana helps to cure anxiety or depression — and evidence it can make low-level mental-health problems worse, and even turn them into bigger ones — these mothers claim they use cannabis as a form of “self-care.”

What a load of narcissistic hooey.

Children who are mobile, but don’t yet understand certain dangers, are at the most risk when they lack a sober adult supervising them.

A baby left in a crib for hours will be fine — responsible parents do it every night.

What you can’t do is leave toddlers wandering around the house while you indulge.

They are the ones who touch hot stoves, run out the door into traffic, drown in bathtubs and swallow small objects.

Sorry if this makes parenting sound like a drag: Sometimes it is exhausting.

You can use drugs to forget that, but using doesn’t make you a better mother.

The “garden moms” Levy interviewed reassured her that they wait some amount of time before getting into a vehicle and driving their children anywhere — but it’s not clear how much time is necessary for a cannabis high to sufficiently subside.

A report from Ohio last year found that almost half of car-crash fatality victims had cannabis in their systems when they died.

And the idea that you can use marijuana every morning but then wait several hours before having to take your kids anywhere seems, let’s just say, unrealistic.

The “garden mom” trend combines two of the worst cultural ideas of the past few decades: That modern motherhood is awful, and that drug use is a harmless individual choice.

Feeling overwhelmed? Maybe your husband or boyfriend needs to step up and pitch in.

Feeling lonely? Maybe spend more time with Mommy and Me groups and less time posting TikTok videos.

Children need close supervision for a relatively short amount of their lives — but during that time, they need it desperately.

Advertising drug use as good parenting isn’t fooling anyone.  

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and project lead at LivesCutShort.